Profile: Changing World Orders

Includes the analysis of military inter-state conflict, civil war, social upheaval within societies and revolutions as well as substantial reform processes transforming a society’s socio-economic outlook and approach towards international affairs.

We interpret “critical junctures of globalization” as moments and arenas where new regimes of territorialisation are negotiated as a reaction to the ongoing dialectical challenge by de-territorialization and re-territorialisation which is the effect of the global condition on societies at least since the mid-19th century. While those aiming at the transformation of individual societies and world order in general look for a delegitimation of old regimes the conflicts under investigation did not end in a borderless and unstructured world but gave birth to new forms of a balance between getting connected and bewaring sovereignty and partial autonomy.

The research undertaken so far and foreseen for the next stage insists on the indissoluble unity of flow and control in the study of globalization. While flows of people, goods, capital and ideas became increasingly important not only in reality but also in conceptual frameworks for interpretation of globalization there are only a few research teams focusing on the search for new ways of controlling these flows. When addressing changing world orders, GESI concentrates on the exactly these new patterns and the conflicts arising out of them (including ‘panics of sovereignty’ where representatives of elder and new patterns of control fight each other).